Shinan: Iron Lady or Devil? Meryl Streep was both at a TIFF Lightbox talk

Meryl Streep was both Iron Lady and Devil at a TIFF Lightbox talk

This being the season of another Meryl Streep miracle — her upcoming biopic about Margaret Thatcher is already causing fuss — the talk on King Street here, Tuesday, was all about her earlier role as the wickedest step-editor of all.
Thatcher-wise, the Guardian praised Streep the other day in an early prognosis of The Iron Lady: “Her performance is astonishing and all but flawless; a masterpiece of mimicry which re-imagines Thatcher in all her half-forgotten glory. Streep has the basilisk stare; the tilted, faintly predatory posture.” Prada-wearing Devil-wise, the man who directed her in that fashion-world comedy circa 2006, David Frankel, told us this dirty little secret: He never saw Miranda Priestly, the diva-editor that Streep inhabited, as the villainess. “She was the heroine,” Frankel matter-of-fact’ed in a candid talk held at the TIFF Lightbox.

Frankel, a specialist of the feeling comedy, didn’t exactly say that Miranda Priestly led to Julia Child, which stopped over in Mamma Mia-land and It’s Complicated, which now leads to Ms. Thatcher — these later-in-life films being an intriguing through-line in Streep’s film arc — but I was thinking it. He found, and unleashed, that certain “looseness” that one critic discerned to describe Streep 3.0, the long-heralded Greatest Actress of Her Generation who also happened to — surprise! — turn into a mega-bankable star. Or, as Mike Nichols told Vanity Fair last year, “Streep broke the glass ceiling of an older woman being a big star — it has never, never happened before.”

But — aha! — Miranda Priestly almost didn’t happen. “They hated the white wig,” Frankel let it slip here. A caravan of Fox executives flew to New York to discuss the issue of the powder-white hair, in fact, during which Streep — channelling Miranda — stared them down and made them acquiesce.

All the hairy deets, and more, came during what was billed as a director-friendly “masterclass,” sprung by the Canadian Film Centre. One that even Eugene Levy took in — and also said a few welcoming words at. During his brief rah-rah-rah, we learned that he likes The Devil Wears Prada. Like, really, really, really likes. Describing it as one of those movies you can’t help but stop and watch if you’re flipping channels on TV, he added, with thunder, “It is to comedy what Godfather 2 is to drama.”

(And here we thought Dan Levy was the fashionista in the family!)

Of course, Mr. Frankel wasn’t going anywhere without giving some poop on his other, much-crowd-pleasing flick Marley & Me. Movie-holic Richard Crouse, who had the director in the hot seat this eve, made sure to ask him about the tale of doggy martyrdom. This much was discerned: a) Frankel thinks Jen Aniston is an “underrated actress” who has unsung dramatic chops, and b) the real-life Marley portrayer is alive and well and living semi-retired in Venice, Calif. (Phew!)

But, hey, it ain’t a home run every time, as Frankel revealed. Asked what he thinks makes a comedy tick, he jousted, “I can tell you what makes a comedy unfunny — ’cause I just made one of those!”

He was speaking of The Big Year — starring Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson — which came out this fall, and D-I-E-D at the box office. It being a comedy about birdwatching, Frankel philosophized, “Turns out that birdwatching is a negative in movie marketing … not neutral … actually a negative.”

The moral of the story, as we all filed out of this mini-film course, could also be applied to life at large: some things work out; others don’t.